Ideas Freshly Leaked From My Mind

Sliding Scale of Physical Laws

Well now, there’s an odd title. Allow me to elaborate. First, I must begin with the fact that I am neither a scientist of any kind nor am I employing the scientific method. I am an artist performing a thought exercise. Allow the scientific community to explore, test, refine, and prove/disprove my hypothesis. As the son of an engineer raised on great science fiction, I love exploring the what ifs of what I find in the news regarding scientific discoveries.

I once read about the discovery of a planet in a different solar system which had a density roughly akin to that of styrofoam. This was considered unusual due to the total mass of the object. Simply put, it is believed that the gravitational pressure upon the mass of the object should have compacted the matter. This led to another blogger to point out that the physical laws of nature may vary within different regions of the universe. Sounds like chaos, doesn’t it?

But there could be order in this concept after all. What if there was some sort of overriding law that governed how the laws of nature worked in other areas of the universe? That by knowing how one physical law was affected, one could predict in what ways the others would be?

Let us begin the exploration of this idea with a few definitions and base concepts. The term void in this context would refer to the theoretically infinite amount of space out there that an object could occupy within the realm of matter and energy. The term universe would then be defined as the expanding debris of matter spreading out from a single point as is currently believed. You know, galaxies and the like. The origin would be the single point from which the universe expands. The edge would refer to the rapidly moving edge of the universe out into the void. Get the picture? If not, you’ll only get lost from here. Try one of my other articles instead. If you follow me so far, we can now describe my concept.

Genesis describes God as stretching out the heavens, a point made by Ken Ham in how creationism explains the expansion of the universe while debating Bill Nye. For the evolutionists within the readership, please refer to the base concept of the Big Bang. In either case. The universe is expanding. If I am not mistaken, as one stretches out a piece of rubber, tension is greater in the center and the material becomes thin. The rubber is thickest along the edges. Now let’s apply this concept to the universe stretching out into the void. There are only two differences. One must invert the distribution of density. The universe would be denser toward the center, I think. Also, the rubber model is two dimensional and the universal model is in three dimensions. It would be reasonable to postulate that the differences in the laws of physics, assuming that there are any, would follow a similar pattern.

We could divide the regions of the universe into spherical layers, like the atmosphere. Perhaps the laws concerning mass and pressure would vary in accordance to these spheres and their distance from the center. It could then take less pressure to compact the same matter at the center sphere than it would at the edge sphere. Then all of our current formulas would simply need a new factor, the sphere in which an object is located. Light behaves as both a particle and a wave, putting it on the border of matter and energy. Since the discovery of the planet that sparked the idea would be located in a different sphere, it stands to reason that matter and energy can travel between the spheres.

While it would be possible that matter would be governed by the laws of the sphere from which it came, it is far more likely that it would be governed by the laws of the sphere in which it is located. That is, less pressure would be required to crush us as we traveled to more central spheres. Questions still remain. Would the spheres expand along with the universe? Or would additional spheres be created along the edge? What other physical laws are affected? Would they change the same way, or would they require separate theories? Am I off my rocker? That last one has been asked before. I think the answer is yes.

That is as far as I have explored the idea. Let us see what discoveries are made in the future.